Sunday, 11 October 2015

Jesse Eisenberg’s casting as Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice raised more than a few eyebrows — Eisenberg is typically known for playing nebbish, fidgety characters, but if the trailers for Batman v Superman are any indication, it looks as though Zack Snyder put those qualities to interesting use, giving us a Lex Luthor unlike any we’ve seen before. If you’re curious to know more about Eisenberg’s Luthor, this latest piece of viral marketing sheds some light on what Snyder and Eisenberg are doing with the notorious Superman baddie.

Fortune ran a “profile” of Alexander Joseph Luthor Jr., aka Lex Luthor, describing the LexCorp CEO as a “jeans-wearing genius” and “baby-faced billionaire” who “transformed an aging petrochemical and heavy machinery dinosaur into a tech darling.” The profile immediately calls to mind Mark Zuckerberg, the eccentric genius behind Facebook — whom Eisenberg impressively portrayed in David Fincher’s The Social Network. It’s all making a little more sense now, isn’t it?

The fictional Luthor is interviewed while waiting in line at the company’s vegan food truck, and explains how he inherited the company from his father. The profile describes Luthor as “down-to-Earth” and goes on to note that LexCorp is “the second largest emerging technology corporation in the world next to Wayne Enterprises.” But while Wayne Enterprises has moved away from military contracts, LexCorp is embracing them:

“It’s a necessity,” Luthor insists. “We live in the most dangerous point of time in all of human history. Statistically speaking, it’s a near certainty that another world-changing crisis is hurtling toward us like a speeding bullet. We have to be ready to defend ourselves. No civilization was ever conquered by having a strong military.”

As for the accusations of a few fringe outliers who accuse him of being a “war monger,” Luthor just laughs them off. “I don’t know very many ‘war mongers’ who have a foosball table in the conference room.”

Our new Lex Luthor isn’t terribly different from previous iterations, though he has been modernized a bit to fit into a more contemporary narrative. That said, if you have an allergy to vegan idealists, you probably already dislike the guy.